This web site is designed as an electronic supplement to accompany the manuscript Reentrant Waves in a Ring of Embryonic Chick Ventricular Cells Imaged with a Ca^{2+} Sensitive Dye by Hortensia Gonzalez, Yoshihiko Nagai, G. Bub, Leon Glass, and Alvin Shrier. Experiments were carried out in a ring of 7 day old embryonic chick ventricular heart cells that were cultured in the form of a ring. The experiments image fluorescence from calcium sensitive dyes. The images are false colors generated by filtering the raw data. The various animations represent the most common types of dynamic behavior. All these types of behavior are analogous to normal and abnormal rhythms observed in clinical cardiology. More details can be obtained by consulting the original manuscript. An earlier paper from our group available in pdf format Bub G, Glass L, Publicover N, Shrier A: Bursting calcium rotors in cultured cardiac myocyte monolayers. Proc Natl Acad Sci (USA). 1998;95:10283-10287. reports on dynamics in the same preparation cultured as a sheet of cells rather than a ring of cells.

Reentry The image on the right shows a circulating wave on a ring with a period of about 1.5 seconds. This type of circulating wave was envisioned as a mechanism of reentrant tachycardia by G. R. Mines, On circulating excitations in heart muscles and their possible relation to tachycardia and fibrillation. Trans R Soc Can. 1914;4:43-53, and subsequently used by many others. For example, in Frame and Simson, Oscillations of conduction, action potential duration, and refractoriness: A mechanism for spontaneous termination of reentrant tachycardias. Circulation. 1988;78:1277-1287, a ring of ventricular tissue was used as a substrate to support a reentrant rhythm. The current work is the first work that develops a tissue culture model that supports reentrant rhythms in a ring.

hgg@hp.fciencias.unam.mx